Snapshots
by Veterization
Summary: Unrequited Matt/Allison oneshot. Snapshots of Matt's life in sophomore year.


_A/N_: I do not own Teen Wolf.

* * *

Matt notices Allison long before that goddamn Scott McCall does.

On the first day of his sophomore year, he oversleeps, still wrapped in the nostalgia of his sheets and summertime, and consequently ends up seizing his backpack and foregoing breakfast fifteen minutes behind schedule. He arrives to school just in time to grab one of the last parking spots when he sees a girl perched on a bench outside the front doors.

She has long brown hair and pretty, ebony eyelashes that frame her brown eyes and accent her pink lips. Her legs tuck together under the bench and her hands fiddle with the strap of her bag as the unmistakable symptoms of back-to-school nerves, except in her case, new-girl nerves might be piled on top of that heap. Matt knows he's never seen that face in the school before, not among the swarm of everyday faces. There's girls who giggle in the bathrooms when they should be in class and the ones who squeal and turn away when he unscrews the lens on his camera and the ones who wear their skirts too high and roll their eyes when teachers chastise their indecency, and to Matt, they're all the same. He knows intrinsically that this girl is different, entirely her own.

He smiles at her when he's walking past, slowing his urgent footwork in order to make it to first hour in time to a leisurely stroll that gives him more time to soak in her hands and her delicate nose, and she smiles back for a nanosecond before her face contorts once more into one of poorly veiled anxiety and she turns her attention back to the supplies stacked in her bag.

Matt considers greeting her properly, maybe welcoming her to Beacon Hills or finding her later during lunch to strike up a casual conversation about how demanding English homework looks this year or how packed the halls are during passing period, but he never does.

Scott McCall does it first.

* * *

He starts getting better at photography.

Matt began his hobby a few years ago, back when his only escape from visions of waves and gurgling water engulfing him whole and leaving him sodden to the very bone was to view the world through a lens, a thin glass wall that managed to separate him from the reality that could easily grip him around the ribcage and squeeze until the air was pulled from his lungs. In freshman year, he pools together enough money from shoveling driveways and walking the neighbor's dog to buy a truly professional camera that lets him ditch the prehistoric trinket of technology he was using before, and by sophomore year, his shutter's clicking away and his parents are buying him memory cards instead of video games.

He has a phase where he shoots nothing but brick walls from what he believed at the time to be artsy angles and fascinating viewpoints, but later to be a failed attempt at capturing interesting still life photographs. After that he tries abandoned cups of coffee smeared with smudged imprints of lipstick he sees lying around in cafes, then half-used Christmas candles surrounded by pools of wax, then empty candy wrappers, and after that, he moves from inanimate objects to live beings.

His first subject is Allison.

* * *

Matt truly does believe that Allison is the subject of a perfect picture.

He's studied the works of Ansel Adams' landscapes and taken inspiration from the amateur photographers on the Internet, and he's still positive that all pictures, whether they were taken by famous photographer's hands or shot through their famous cameras, are incomplete without her. He imagines what it would be like to have Allison look straight at his lens, laugh and hide her grin and chuckle when he tells her to smile wide for the cameraman instead of shooting discreet pictures he scrolls through later that only capture half a hemisphere of her face or a few wayward strands of her wavy hair. The only thing that would make his pictures more perfect would be to have her be an active participant in them, to pose until the shutter clicks or to grab it from him and hand it to a stranger so he could take a picture of them both. He imagines that she'd kiss him on the cheek and then wipe off her sticky lip gloss after it's done, or maybe rest her chin on his shoulder and smile into the crook of his neck. She'd be the subject of pictures he'd look at forever.

He pictures asking her out in his head multiple times until he's rehearsed lines that, in his opinion, are both humorous and tickled with charm. He thinks that maybe she'd like frozen yogurt, or maybe she'd be a movie buff, or maybe she'd agree to drive all the way out to the beach with him on a Friday night. She would prance in the water and play with the salty waves and beg for him to splash in the sea with her after she's done rolling her pants up to her ankles and wading into the foamy water, and he would decline.

He'd take pictures from the shore, sitting on a heap of dry sand that slips into his shoes and itches on his toes, and stare at the two things he knows are faraway prospects—Allison Argent, and water.

The day Matt decides it's time to face at least one of his fears where he waits at Allison's locker after lunch to see if she'd like to study with him in the library after school for a while, he sees Allison walk down the hallway hand-in-hand with Scott McCall, the utter epitome of awe etched across McCall's face while he takes in the sweet sound of her voice that Matt wishes he could bottle up all for himself and the soft curl of her hair that McCall shouldn't have the right to card his fingers through.

For a second, he feels like there's water welling up in his lungs again, an entire lake forced into his esophagus and oozing out his shoes at negative temperatures, cold enough to freeze his entire throat and overwhelming enough for him to blink and see the dark pit of the pool again, to feel the _thunk_as he sinks and lands on the bottom, to taste the acidic chlorine seep into his mouth and make his tongue recoil, and then he snaps back to the high school hallway.

He doesn't want to dwell on the memory, nor the ache in his chest or the sight of McCall's accomplished face when he threads his hand into Allison's, but he still takes a picture. Matt doesn't think it'll make him feel better, knows it won't, and he still does. The shutter snaps closed and when it opens, he stares down at a picture of Allison, mouth curved in the start of a coy smile, and McCall, standing beside her.

Matt downloads it that night, locks himself into his room, and tries to stare at it until it makes him feel better and his stomach stop churning. His mother tries to coo at him and pat his shoulder when he picks at his dinner plate and refuses to share what's bothering him, murmuring helpful words about how he's got years to charm all the girls until they're all pushing glittery valentines into his locker, but he doesn't want advice or even reassurances. He wants Allison.

When McCall's face, frozen in time in the photograph, slightly grainy and mocking him more and more by each passing second, only fuels Matt's rage, he cuts him out and photoshops himself in. It's not his best work, but Matt still feels better.

* * *

Matt hasn't thought about payback for years, not since he was a little boy with too much fury for his young body to handle when it was supposed to be bursting with innocence and thoughts of running through playgrounds. He still thinks about Lahey's dripping face looming over his gasping body, thinks about what it would be like to see helplessness on his face instead of the grim lack of sympathy he saw the night he was dragged from the pool, but he forces it back. He still feels water trickle down his throat when summertime officially begins and he sees the children jump into a pool, plastic flotation devices attached securely to their arms and squeals of delight falling from their tongues. But the anger that gripped his very bones and left him aching for karma's deliverance on the witnesses of his drowning faded, leaving dull aches and mere sparks of cantankerous fire fueling his temper.

When the kanima enters his life, revenge comes knocking on his door again.

Things start changing, all too soon. Allison stops wearing leather jackets sometime when the wintertime chill starts thawing and gives way for the budding of spring mornings, and with it, Scott McCall seems to melt with the ice into problems of the past. They don't walk together in the hallways anymore and link their fingers together under desks, instead divvying up their friends and straying away. Matt wonders if they grew apart, their high school romance sizzling to an end as many do, or if maybe he didn't offer what Allison needed. Maybe she needed safety and arms to hold her at night, or maybe she needed less fawning. Maybe the novelty of dating the best lacrosse player on the team wore off when she noticed that he was all brawn and no brains. Whatever it is, Matt knows he could do better.

For a while, she makes him forget about the pool. The way the past still bubbles in his lungs and fills his nights with either tears of terror or hot waves of rage. Whenever the consternation comes back as a tightly-strung pit in his stomach, he thinks of how her sugary perfume smelled when he walks by her desk in English or how her dimples appear when she smiles, _really_smiles, and the world returns and the water flushes away drip by drip from his waterlogged mind.

After Jackson, after the kanima finds him by his car, things change. His brain is split between two fantasies—the one where he dreams of revenge and justice delivering wrath on those who deserve it, and the one where he reveres in thoughts of Allison's doting eyes zeroing in on him. He would be able to stop taking pictures, stop having to live through the frozen snaps and doctored chunks of her life where he inserts himself in as an unwelcome bystander, and prove himself for her. Erase McCall from the picture for good.

But the idea of revenge, it eats at him like the bird did on Prometheus. Every day, relentlessly, until he has little choice but to give in to the weapon of opportunity that has been so clearly gifted to him in the form of a veritable monster extending a slimy paw to his car's window. After the pool, Matt didn't believe in miracles, much less the honorable aftermaths of karma and judgment that would remove wickedness from the universe, but rather just in darkness. Just the destruction of nature and with it, the destruction of man. The lack of safety in the world.

When the kanima befriends him, there is justice again. There is the idea of a future in which Matt doesn't drown every night and doesn't shy away from the sound of the showerhead spitting out a torrent of water hitting the bathtub, but where he sleeps in satisfaction.

He keeps taking pictures, but this time, they're of his killers.

* * *

Matt kisses Allison at the rave, under the vibration of the bouncing bodies and the pound of the music, and she doesn't kiss back.

It's not everything he thought it would be.

He learns that night that justice and kanimas and murder, however strong they make him feel, don't grant him everything, Allison Argent included.

* * *

When Matt drowns for the second time, he fights.

He thrashes, he doesn't sink to the bottom, and he tries to pry off the grip of almighty death the old man's hands have on his shirt. He tries not to let a single bit of the water in, not a drop, but it's already encased him like a snare of seaweed. The water tastes like chlorine and murky lake water all at the same time, everything he's dreaded it to be for all of these years swirling up in his chest until his heart bursts with the pressure and dead air is left whistling through his ribcage.

Matt sees Lahey, he sees Jessica, he sees Shawn and Kara. He sees Jackson, half his body laced in scales and eyes glassy with the film of obedience that came with Matt's abuse of power. He sees the flustered faces of the nameless party guests that stared at him like he was a fish out of water when Jackson pulled him out of Lydia's pool. He sees Scott, clutching the blood stain that seeped into his shirt after he shot him, and really, he should have shot him twice, maybe even three times, for taking Allison from him. He sees Stiles staring down the barrel of his gun and the empty gazes of the mangled police officers that were casualties in his plight for relief from the water. From the bubbles and the gasping and the useless inhalers.

He wonders, briefly, right before the darkness comes again, if what he thought justice to be is this—his body destined to be united with its ultimate foe, water, to wallow in its own sodden misery—and not a graveyard full of his murderers. If maybe he's had karma wrong all along, and this is what he deserves. It makes him feel hollow, empty, because maybe this is why he doesn't get that white light of hope for better times and brighter futures. Maybe he doesn't deserve it, even if he doesn't deserve to be throttled and drowned by a man three times his age either.

He thinks of Allison, of her terrified face when he found her paralyzed on the floor by the kanima's venom, her usually perfect hair splayed over her mouth and her eyes twitching in wide-eyed fear while her crossbow laid yards away out of reach, and her equally haunted expression when she clutched the camera bag she had discovered in the foot of the passenger seat in her car after the rave, and the momentary taste of her lip gloss before she tensed and turned away into her shoulder. He thinks of how he should have taken more pictures.

Revenge, Matt bets, is a dish best served not only cold, but by those who have at least some experience in preparing dishes in the first place.

-_fin_


End file.
